


The Cry of the Cicadas

by shipcat



Series: The Cry of the Cicadas [1]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe, Currently Gen, Eventual Kakuzu/Itachi, Gen, Hidan STILL tries to take over the story, Hidan refuses to join the Akatsuki, I love that trash king but now it's Itachi's turn to shine~, Itachi becomes Kakuzu's partner instead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-17
Updated: 2018-02-17
Packaged: 2019-03-20 07:59:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 964
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13713375
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shipcat/pseuds/shipcat
Summary: An average day in the lives of Kakuzu and Uchiha Itachi, in an alternate universe where they are Akatsuki partners.





	The Cry of the Cicadas

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by my chats with @ichaichatactics, who pointed out that no one shipped KakuIta. Well. Now they do.
> 
> Story Art by [@ghost-kaiju](https://ghost-kaiju.tumblr.com); thank you so much!

 

A flock of doves scattered as Itachi, Kakuzu, and their prisoner casually approached the drop off point.

Feathers brushed against the clouds, rushed, as if the sky were a painting drying too quickly. The doves cried out to the heavens, begging them to wait.

All of this occurred in the blink of an eye, observed by Itachi through the gaps in the rice-straw sandokasa perched delicately on his head. A shame, he thought, as the avian silhouettes faded into the distance. Today was an excellent day for bird watching.

The drop off point was, as usual, a decrepit scene from a particularly horrific book - with a building that was more rubble than architecture. Three walls leaned against each other, barely clinging to their foundations. The last wall did not even feign at sturdiness, but instead had collapsed somewhere off to the side, where it was overtaken by the forest. Worst of all was the stench of death that clung about the place, and settled heavily into Itachi’s lungs. The Uchiha wrinkled his nose and held his breath so as not to cough in front of his partner. A sidelong glance at Kakuzu revealed that he, too, was not particularly impressed by the state of the drop off point.

“It will be a short visit, then?” Itachi remarked.

Kakuzu gave the barest of nods. He took a small kunai out of his pocket, held it up to the sunlight, and flashed a quick message at the building. After a tense moment, someone in the building flashed a response at the two Akatsuki members, signalling that it was safe to enter.

Itachi and Kakuzu wordlessly fell into their normal routine; Kakuzu, after a sideways glance at Itachi, slipped into the shadows of the building where he would negotiate the price of their bounty; Itachi, in contrast, turned towards the prisoner in order to check the strength of the genjutsu binding him to their will.

He took off his sandokasa and set it gently on the ground. Strips of paper, attached to the hat, shivered in the summer wind. In his opinion, the rustling, combined with the distant flapping of wings and the various sounds of the wild were quite beautiful; and so Itachi closed his eyes, so that his ears could better drink in the natural symphony.

Minutes ticked by. The sounds of the forest grew fainter and fainter, until all that remained was the whine of the cicadas. Eventually, even that faded into silence.

In that moment, Itachi’s eyes snapped open. The red Mangekyou Sharingan seared into the violet eyes of their prisoner. He stood there, slack jawed and dazed, as Itachi crawled into the crevices of his mind, bypassing monstrous nightmares and nightmarish memories, and a marbled beast which stood several stories high, whose face was simply an angry, inverted triangle inscribed within a circle.

Itachi flew deeper and deeper into the prisoner’s subconscious, until, finally, he appeared before the man in a swirl of black feathers and sharp beaks. He stood up, brushing his hair back as he regarded the man trapped in an illusion of his choice - an eternity of having his liver devoured by ravens. It was a suitable punishment for a man that claimed to be immortal.

“S-Rank,” Itachi suddenly said, startling some of his familiars into flight. They cawwed at him, irritated, before returning to circle around his prey. “Hidan of the Village Hidden in the Steam.”

Itachi leisurely strolled up to the prisoner, migraine pounding behind his skull as he inspected the fiery strands of chakra tangled around the man’s limbs.

“Wanted for the massacre of an entire sector of citizens….” the Uchiha continued. With a flick of his hand, he added several additional chains where his seal had become thin. "What a coincidence it is… that our sins are so similar.“

Hidan glared up at Itachi, red pouring from his scalp and into the white of his eyes. “Fuck you,” he said, spitting at his captor.

“Hm.” Itachi considered the bloody loogie on the ground. “No thank you.”

He frowned.

The criminal had been their captive for more than a week now, while they searched for a bounty station willing to pay full value for his head, and, despite experiencing what seemed to be tens of thousands of years of torture, Hidan refused to be broken: He had, in fact, nearly broken free of the Itachi’s Mangekyo several times, forcing Kakuzu and him to take turns watching over their hypnotized prisoner lest he wander off into a creek or off a cliff.

It was undoubtedly impressive - and incredibly worrying.

An unkillable man with an never ending thirst for blood, and a growing resistance to illusions… Itachi shuddered at the thought of the Akatsuki recruiting this monster to their cause.  How many villages could he destroy if left unchecked? Tens? Hundreds? Thousands? Thinking about the potential catastrophe was enough to make one’s head spin. Or maybe that was just the strain of using the Mangekyou multiple times within the past month.

Itachi poured more and more chakra into the illusion surrounding Hidan, until the genjutsu enveloped Hidan like a cocoon. The prisoner’s curses grew louder, more fierce, before finally peaking into a heart wrenching screeches, at which point the Uchiha extracted himself from Hidan’s mind and returned to the real world, where the sun had now begun to descend.  In his absence, the tranquil forest had grown quieter. Kakuzu was still gone.

Exhaling, Itachi bent down to the ground and gracefully kneeled on his feet. Brushing the folds away from his cloak, he sat, watched the drop off point, and listened to the rattling of his own lungs mix with the panicked pulse of their prisoner; a song of life and death.

All he could do was wait.

**Author's Note:**

> Catch me on Tumblr [@thatshipcat](https://thatshipcat.tumblr.com)


End file.
